1. Underground Blossom
  2. News

Underground Blossom News

Underground Blossom - Update 1.1.3

After working on the game for over a year it was so awesome to see so many players already enjoy Underground Blossom today. Thanks so much for that!

We’re working hard to respond to everyone and address the issues that some of you have found. With this update, we have fixed several issues including the disappearing cubes bug! In the patch notes below you can read more about what we’ve improved.

If you were effected by the disappearing cube bug it unfortunately means you will have to reset the game and play through it again. We have tried really hard to come up with a solution to work around this but it was simply not possible. Please reach out to our support [at] rustylake.com email and mention this bug to see if we can do anything for you.

If you are experiencing any other issues please reach out to us on our Discord!

Patch Notes 1.1.3

  • Disappearing cubes no longer disappear!
  • Fixed duplicate cubes in inventory
  • Wallet Sorrow Cross fix
  • Translation issues fixed
  • Laura School St visual error
  • Several other bug fixes


Enjoy your ride!

🚇 Underground Blossom is OUT NOW! 🌸

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Underground Blossom is OUT NOW! 🚇🌸

Do you have a ticket ready? 🎟️ It’s time to catch the train to Underground Blossom:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2291850/Underground_Blossom/

The game is also available on iOS, Android, GOG and itchio!

But before you rush off to board the metro and embark on the latest Rusty Lake adventure, we hope you’ll take some time to read a few words of thanks from The Lake!

Developing this game has been quite a journey. As you might have read in our first #UBDevlog, the game has been in the works for a few years. We laid the ground base for the structure and story two years ago and from there we switched gears by working on The Past Within. At the start of this year, we could finally put the focus back on Underground Blossom. Being able to share a demo during our 8-year anniversary marked an amazing milestone for us and the project. The support and encouragement gave us all the energy we needed to go full steam ahead towards a 2023 release, which is today, September 27.

Although the new release feels quite soon after shipping The Past Within, we are so happy to share this beautiful experience with you all. As mentioned before, Underground Blossom feels like a train ride back to our own roots at Rusty Lake. (Quite literally, because this game has many ties with Roots). As you travel from station to station and experience various events in Laura’s life, we hope you will enjoy all the small details we put in there for you. So make sure to take your time, and don’t rush on your quest for the next train!

We really hope you’ll enjoy the game as for us, Underground Blossom has already become one of our favourite games to date. We think the whole journey together with its accompanying music and sound is unmatched in the Rusty Lake universe. And we hope you feel the same!

A big thank you to GlitchKraft for their awesome gameplay recording of the first 3 stations in Underground Blossom! You can watch the playthrough on our Steam page for the whole first week of release!

Last but not least, we’d like to thank everyone who helped us pave the tracks for this incredible metro journey! 🙏 The soundtrack, sound design, voice acting, QA, translation and localisation, and all of you, our patient passengers, made this project truly special! Thank you so much! 🖤

The Day of The Lake is coming,

Team Rusty Lake

Ps. Don’t forget to make your metro conductor happy by leaving a review of your experience with the Rusty Lake underground! 🙏🖤
Ps2. If you encounter any issue or bug, please share your issue in the feedback channel on Discord or reach out to us at support [at] rustylake [dot] com.

Underground Blossom – Devlog 3 – Q&A with Rusty Lake

Q&A with Rusty Lake




Thanks again for taking the time to send us so many awesome questions. This time we decided to stick mostly to Underground Blossom related questions but worry not, we will host more general Q&As in the future.

First, a little introduction in case you are new to The Lake:

[h2]About Rusty Lake[/h2]

Rusty Lake is an indie game studio based in Amsterdam, founded by Robin Ras & Maarten Looise. Since 2015, we have developed 16 surrealistic point-and-click adventure games in the Rusty Lake Universe. The story of all these games are intertwined and every instalment reveals more about the Rusty Lake mysteries.

We have released the following games on PC and mobile: Cube Escape Collection (bundle of our 9 Cube Escape episodes), Cube Escape: Paradox, Samsara Room and four premium games: Rusty Lake Hotel, Rusty Lake: Roots, Rusty Lake Paradise and The White Door. The Past Within, our first co-op experience, was released last year and tomorrow, on September 27th, we will release Underground Blossom.

[h2]A community interview:[/h2]

@malthunos: How did you get the idea to develop Laura’s story in a subway? 🚇

When we brainstorm about new Rusty Lake games, we often start by thinking about interesting locations. A subway or metro station was in our heads for a long time. Eventually, we enjoyed the idea that a metro stop could symbolise a new chapter in someone’s life. Sharing more about Laura Vanderboom’s (secret) life turned out to be the perfect fit for this location for a game, we only had to wait for the right moment.

@onaiashraf: How long will the game be? 🕰️

Over the past 3 months, we held as many playtests as possible. Some sessions took over 3 hours, while others were much quicker and finished the game within 1.5 hours. Therefore we estimate a normal playthrough of Underground Blossom at 2 hours. But your journey doesn’t simply end after the final station…

Creen Greeper: How many stations will it be? 🚉

Underground Blossom will have seven standard stations.

@amiito23_’s: How important is music or the theme going to be to Underground Blossom…? 🌸

As we mentioned in our Devlog 2 last week, music and sound have been among the most important parts of this game. The piano and cello worked so well to enhance the (emotional) journey of Laura. We cannot thank all our musicians enough for their incredible work, Victor, Sebastiaan, Remco and, of course, our sound designers, Jorick and Giliam, did a tremendous job of getting the perfect metro atmosphere for the game.

@r_no_registrada’s: Do I need the other games to discover the secrets of UB? 🦉

Most secrets in Underground Blossom can be found without prior knowledge of our other games. But we do recommend to have at least played the Cube Escape Collection (free on mobile). As always, all our games are connected in one way or another and Underground Blossom won’t be any different. So only our die-hard fans can collect the 34 achievements without hints/a walkthrough!

@nowhere: Will you keep the secret ARG level from UB Lite in the full version? It was so enlightening! 📼

Yes, you can still reach the Best Kept Memory station in the full game 🙂

@gracie._.smiles22: What was the hardest bug to fix? 🐛

Last night we fixed a bug that removed one item and duplicated the other in your inventory. While this rare bug was already mentioned in the Lite/Demo version, we never figured out how to fix it. Until last night. We somehow experienced the same bug again and Ruben, our main play tester and bug hero, gathered the right info to reproduce it. Because of the frame-by-frame movie clip he made, we were able to see exactly what happened and we fixed the code just in time!

Ps. We cannot guarantee the game is completely bug-free, so please let us know on Discord or support [at] rustylake [dot] com if you experience anything while playing.

@mc_puddlls’s: How many voices will there be in the game? Will it have more than one voice actor? 🗣️

Unfortunately, our best and beloved voice actor Bob Rafferty won’t be the only one voicing the characters this time around (although he would have loved to). Just like in The White Door, Bob Rafferty, Iris Muller and Sara Hill are our main voice actors, but this time we got help from several different voice actors to bring the right quality to the game. But then again, there are more characters in-game, so you might know who helped us out here.

@PurpleMcgee: Will there ever be a reveal of why Rose left Laura? 🌹

Yes! But we cannot say too much about this yet.

@reyyanbetul_akgul’s: Which languages will be in the new game? 🌎

Our amazing group of translators together with our localization manager, Luuk, made Underground Blossom available in 21 languages! Please double-check your store (mobile or PC) to see if your language is available. We hope to add more languages in the future, but it costs a lot of time and hard work (from both sides) to implement a language correctly, hence why it will take us time to implement more languages.

@alr.saraa’s: Not about the development process but will you have a #laketober this year? 🎨

Yes! October would not exist without #Laketober. Our community managers Andreea, Damy and our mod team on Discord cannot wait to share the prompt list very soon! And yes it will be centred around Underground Blossom!

@niohsen.shanjamali’s: What happened to the mammoth game?

We cannot go back that far in time just yet. Now it’s time to Blossom 🎟️ 🚇 🌸

We hope we answered your burning questions about Underground Blossom and other Rusty Lake topics, we did our best to get to as many of them as possible! Thank you for all your great questions, but now we need to once again retreat and prepare the final tweaks on the upcoming Underground Blossom metro!

Underground Blosssom is a new adventure game by Rusty Lake and comes out tomorrow at 13:00 CEST / 04:00 PT. It’s a premium game and will cost around €/$ 4,99 on Steam (but with a 30% discount in the first week)! If you are not sure this is a game for you; please check out our demo: you can still download it here on the Steam or download try the Lite version on Mobile!


See you on Release Station tomorrow, September 27th!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2291850/Underground_Blossom/

Less than 3 days left! 👀



Less than 3 days left and we’re excited to share that Underground Blossom runs smoothly on the Steam Deck! 🤩

If you have some 🔥 questions about the development process for Underground Blossom or anything else Rusty Lake-related, leave them in the comments below. Our final devlog will be a Q&A!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2291850/Underground_Blossom/

Underground Blossom Devlog 2 - Sound and Music

[h3]Underground Blossom Devlog 2 - Sound and Music[/h3]


Hi everyone! 👋

We are back with a new devlog! Since the music and sound devlog we wrote for The Past Within was one of our most popular devlog to date, we are very excited to share more about this interesting process for Underground Blossom as well. From the start, we knew that Underground Blossom’s gameplay experience would depend heavily on its soundtrack and that we needed something beautiful (and different) to accompany you through Laura Vanderboom’s journey. Luckily we have a great team around us that was (and is) ready to help elevate the audio of our upcoming project to new heights.

Music

It was back in May this year (2023) when Victor Butzelaar invited us to a studio session at one of Amsterdam's most iconic music places (Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ). After composing the main theme song on the piano a few months before, Victor was now eager to record the complete soundtrack for Underground Blossom in an official studio - a first in the Rusty Lake series. He was accompanied by Sebastiaan van Halsema, a very experienced cello player, and Arjan van Asselt, who helped record all the input in the best quality possible. It was a magnificent experience for us to hear the piano and cello working together. It felt like we were attending our own Rusty Lake concert!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
That day Victor and his team recorded dozens of tracks for Underground Blossom and we couldn't wait to try them in-game. As expected, the recorded music fit the atmosphere of the game perfectly, so much so that almost all tracks ended up in the actual game. The combination of the piano and cello worked so well to enhance the (emotional) journey of Laura. Each station has its own vibe and feeling, all thanks to the diverse tracks created by Victor.

Fun note: the way the in-game music works is a bit different than our previous games (except for The Past Within), here some music is only triggered in the case of a (special) event. Only then a piano/cello theme will start to play.

Sound

After our first successful sound design collaboration for The Past Within, we couldn’t wait to work again with our amazing sound designers Jorick and Giliam from Driftwood Audio. The sound effects in our first co-op game truly elevated the experience and for Underground Blossom, we wanted to reach at least the same level of quality. This mixed in with the right (background) sound effects would be necessary to achieve the right atmosphere for a game that takes place mostly on metro station platforms. After months of hard work, we are happy to share that they delivered once again, and how! The game is filled with more than 240 unique sound effects and we are sure you will have fun with quite a few of them.

Voiceover and extra effects

There are many characters to meet in Underground Blossom, some familiar faces, but also quite a few new ones. Bob Rafferty, our favourite man of many voices, is back! He even whispers this time. Iris Muller, whom you might remember from The White Door, is returning to voice Laura again. Andreea Bosgan, our very own community manager, takes the role of Young Laura to profess her need for candy. And we have some special guests like Hugo Bonaparte and Mike Wijdenbosch for some new characters. Next to all these voices, we have Remco Mikkers who adds his trumpet solos to the choir - yet another amazing addition to the overall sounds of Underground Blossom.


At the moment of writing this we are still fine-tuning the audio of the game: adding/adjusting some final sound effects and voiceovers. It is always the final steps that make the game feel and sound perfect. We hope you enjoyed getting some insights on the music, sound and voiceovers that you can expect to experience very soon in the game. The release date is very close now.. we have to go… we hear a metro arriving...

Ps. Don’t forget to share your questions below for next week's Q&A session!